One of Andrew Cuomo’s more dubious legacies was his push to “transform” mental health in New York by getting rid of psychiatric hospital beds that he said New York didn’t need. Statewide, there were about 10,200 beds in 2014; now there are about 9,100.
Though previous waves of “deinstitutionalization” had strewn chaos in the streets of New York, Cuomo argued that this time it would be different.
It wasn’t.
As beds declined, mental health-related pressures grew on other systems, such as transit, homeless services, police departments, and jails. The promise of community-based care as a better, cheaper alternative to psychiatric hospitalization proved, once again, elusive.
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Stephen Eide is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post